With my daughter’s birthday this last weekend, she required a cake. Well, she actually required two cakes – one for her actual birthday (friday) and one for the party with the fam (sunday). So I pulled out a box of Betty Crocker Rainbow Chip cake mix and got to work. Cake mixes are the only way to go for toddler birthdays. They’re much more concerned with how pretty all the colors are than with the taste (sugar is sugar is sugar to that little palate!). I used two mini-cheesecake pans to make two little ‘layers’ for a tiny layer cake.
When they were done baking, I pulled them out and sliced off that troublesome mound on the top to make it flat and stackable.
Then, I put a layer of icing in the middle (rainbow chip again!) and stacked them up. Notice that in the last step I failed to slice the top off evenly (more of a diagonal cut), but it’s okay because I made that mistake on both of them, so in this case two wrongs really do make a right and they balanced each other out.
Then I frosted all around it! Voila! A little toddler sized layer cake!
So that was Friday’s cake. I made a little ‘cake dome’ with a cheese dome that I got at goodwill for about forty-nine cents, and I put the plate on a footed bowl to make it look like a little cake stand. I did the same thing for Sunday’s cake, with the exception of using a different frosting that came with sprinkles that you added afterwards. I have to say, this frosting was a bit more festive (or at least it was brighter!).
Last year I made the same sort of cake and we gave her the whole thing to dive into and squish between her fingers (another reason to use super easy cake mixes!), mostly because it was her first experience with birthday cake and we wanted it to be really fun. This year we cut her some little slices though in the interest of saving our carpets from the carnage.